“So are all the best people,” she replied. “Besides, you’re the one who invited him.”
“Fix things. I just… I want to help. I want to be useful. But I end up making everything worse.”
My mom, wise as always, reached over and handed him a marshmallow on a stick. “Max,” she said, “you don’t have to fix anything. You just have to be here. That’s the whole point of camping. And of friendship.” Camp With Mom And My Annoying Friend Who Wants ...
But Max couldn’t leave it alone. While my mom went to fill the water bottles, he took it upon himself to “improve” the fire. He dismantled the teepee, stacked the burning logs into a wobbly cabin shape, and then—because the flames were now too low—doused the whole thing with a third of a bottle of lighter fluid he had smuggled in his pack.
The resulting fireball singed his eyebrows, melted the tip of his fancy titanium roasting fork, and sent a column of black smoke into the otherwise pristine sky. My mom returned to find Max patting his smoking hair and me laughing so hard I was crying. “So are all the best people,” she replied
Max, of course, had a “better” method. He produced a collapsible fishing rod with a spinning reel, a tackle box full of lures he couldn’t name, and a fish finder device that beeped loudly every three seconds. He spent forty minutes trying to cast without tangling his line. When he finally got it in the water, he caught a submerged log, then a water lily, then, miraculously, a tiny sunfish—which he then tried to “fix” by reviving it in a bucket of creek water for twenty minutes before my mom gently pointed out the fish had been dead for ten.
My mom looked at me. I looked at the sky. The fish finder beeped on. I want to be useful
“It’s August, Max. The air is still.”